No Contest
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: One rash decision may shape Satellite's entire future, and it's all Martha's fault. Rex/Martha, written for the 5Ds 100 on LiveJournal.


**Title:** No Contest  
**Character/Pairing/Group:** Rex/Martha, chibi!trio  
**Prompt:** #24 - Non-Verbal Communication  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Pairing:** Rex/Martha  
**Summary:** It's what she didn't say that matters.  
**Notes:** Title from the musical "Chess." Current Nano count: 7442.

* * *

Later, she will regret it.

But that is later. This is now. And now is not a good time.

She isn't normally in this part of Satellite – she hates the sight of the Security buildings, tall and gleaming and new while everything around them falls into broken, neglected pieces, a concrete reminder of her own hopes for her future and what happened to them – but the ration centre from which she usually purchases her bread is closed, part of an arbitrary and unnecessary "rezoning" that has left her and her children trekking several miles on foot for their dinner. And so she is outside those hated Security buildings when the helicopter comes in, blowing her hair back from her face and ruffling her skirt around her calves, stopping only when Yuusei tugs insistently at her hand, wanting to stop so he can see the way the giant mechanical bird-thing lands and slows and stops.

The door in the side opens, and she leads her boys onward – she does not want to discourage them from respecting authority, but at the same time she is herself still unwilling to forgive for the loss of her son and husband both to the guns and unfair laws this particular branch of authority makes use of. If she stays here, she will say something she will surely come to regret – if not because it hurts her, because it plants the wrong idea in her children's minds, and then she will be hurt because they will come to grief. She's had enough of that – first Michael, with his father's courage and complete and utter lack of common sense . . . and too soon after, the man who gave him the courage to face a firing squad. She brushes the thought away, buries it beneath a layer of forgetfulness before Yuusei, ever-observant, or perhaps her newest little one – the nameless boy Yuusei and Jack have christened "Crow" – with his ever-present empathy, can see and comment on tears.

The queue at the ration centre is long and slow, and it takes all her patience to keep the boys at her side – particularly the little redhead who is still absolutely entranced with the concept of so much food, good if not always fresh, and stacked neatly in rows made of clean packages. At last she gives up on keeping him in one place, and hands him the shopping list to begin filling the basket. Some items – meat, milk, sugar – are strictly rationed, and for these she needs no list. They will be handed to her if the station has not run out of them and if she has the money. It is only for items that are more readily available, like bread and crackers – the ones that run out whenever they please, instead of being rationed by the day or week – that she has written things down, and these are items Crow can find on his own. He has taught himself to read, and as long as she prints, he is perfectly capable of understanding what she has written. He stays happily busy, picking up breadstuffs, a few assorted spices, the treat she has scrounged up money to buy this week, and when she finally gets into the area between the counters, he comes back to her side happily, ready to help.  
The walk from home was too long; already, though it's not far past noon, the new centre has no eggs and only canned vegetables. Martha consoles herself with the knowledge that her children rarely eat canned vegetables, and picks up a week's worth of canned carrots and green beans.

She takes her box at the end of the line, hoists it with one arm – after four years, she's grown used to it – and uses the other hand to keep the boys just ahead of her and in check, giving each of them a piece of peppermint to encourage them to stay close. Yuusei holds up his arms – even at five, he's eager to help – and she lets him take the bag of bread and rolls. It's light, but even so she can feel the difference in the weight of the box, and she supposes she'll count it a blessing by the time they're home.  
She fights the urge to glare at the Security complex again on the way past, or perhaps the urge to simply stop where she is and cry. The thirsty concrete beneath their feet is stained dark here, and part of that stain is comprised of her son's blood. She does not like walking past the place where so many young lives were thrown away like the garbage that's sorted in the facility across the street; hates knowing that the ghost of Michael's blood is somewhere beneath her shoes because he dared to not recant, to raise a cry for freedom.  
She almost doesn't see him, and when she does, she isn't even entirely sure it _is_ him – the black hair is liberally streaked with gray, and there are new lines on the face that is more than half-turned away from her – but a moment's thought decides her. There cannot possibly be another man so large in this city. Even for someone of Western blood Rex was almost abnormally tall.

She turns, pauses at the gate of Security, wondering if he'll even recognise her, wondering what she will do if he doesn't, wondering what she will do if he does – wondering most of all, perhaps, what he is doing there, dressed in good clothes and standing behind the Security gate. He is shaking his head at one of the guards, hands clasped behind him in an unfamiliar and almost awkward fashion, the gesture so unlike him that she nearly mistook him for someone else.

"I said no," he is saying, and yes, that is her husband's voice she hears. Even after three years, she knows it perfectly. "No guns, no firing, no executions without a direct order. There's been enough blood spilled in this fight, Ogata-san."

Martha feels her grip on the box loosening, but she's powerless to stop it – she might as well be giving her fingers orders from the moon. She makes some sound – a small one, a low one – but it is enough for him to hear, to turn, to see. And she does not have to wonder for even an instant if he still knows her for who she is – his mouth calls her "ma'am" but his eyes still say Martha, and the shock and guilt buried in them is enough to drive her past grief and into anger. She wonders what he sees from the side of the fence he is standing on – his wife, standing over the place where their dying son once lay with blood streaming out of his mouth, raising a last faint but defiant cry for true justice? Or a woman he was married to once, no longer young, having lost whatever charms drew him to her in the first place – eyes grown old, smile gone, hair drawn back in a severe hairstyle that lets her wear it without feeling too ashamed when there is no money for soap to wash with? Or, she wonders, does he not even see that? Does he see only an old woman with a box of groceries cradled in one arm, a small boy clinging to her hand, another to her skirt, no different from any one of the two or three dozen women who survived the blast that tore the city in two? The guilt in his eyes says the last isn't so . . . but she still has to wonder, looking at him, if he sees the woman he left behind or someone else entirely, someone who was that woman, once.

The man behind him jeers at her. She barely hears it. She is too busy looking through a fence at the husband she thought long dead, the one Security has taken from her in more ways than one. She pulls her gaze away from his and addresses the boys, telling them to come, that they have a long walk before they can get home and she wants to start supper. The guard behind the fence shouts at her. She doesn't look at him – instead she redirects her eyes to Rex' eyes, not so much staring him down as making entirely certain he knows she means what she is about to say.

Later she will regret it – later, when she finds out the new Director has halted plans to build a bridge from the city to the Satellite, when "security concerns" are cited as a reason to not allow free passage, and many years after that, when her boys come to her, first Crow and then Yuusei, with the bright yellow stripes on their faces that mean they have taken after Rex, after Michael . . . that they believe in their own right to freedom and have tried and failed to find it. The most she can find to be grateful for is that they are still alive, but even that is a selfish happiness – with the few marginal rights they had stripped away from them, she will think the first time she cleans the infected skin around Crow's first marker, perhaps they would have been better off with a single bullet to the head. But now, her only thoughts are anger, anger and betrayal mingled with hurt and despair, and so she speaks not just with her mouth but with her own eyes, far more rashly than anyone on the other side of the fence save one could possibly know. Three words. Three words that may shape the entire future of Satellite, simply because one woman couldn't hold her own foolish tongue.

"Good day, Director."

She sees and is bitterly satisfied by the mirror of her own hurt that appears in his eyes, quickly masked by his own anger. She does not think, then, of what it might mean, of how badly things might go for her because of her own foolishness. As she sees it, he ought to thank her – she has made it clear that his ties here are severed. She will be silent not out of regard for the Director of Public Security but out of regard for Rex Godwin, the man she met and married some twenty years ago and who is now dead, the memory of him suspended forever over the channel between Satellite and the bustling haven of the city he once promised to take her to. The man who is no longer her husband has nothing to fear from her. Anger? What right does he have to it?

She turns away then, pulling lightly on Jack's hand to speed him along, trying not to remember that the faded red stain beneath her feet is intimately connected not just to her but to the man on the other side of the fence, wanting only to get away from those hated tall and gleaming towers. She doesn't know then what a mistake she's made in the words she both said and didn't say, the message she allowed her face to show – not the wife of a respected scientist but just another Satellite remnant, this one with a trio of boys who are clearly not actually her own. Certainly nobody important to the gray-haired man whose eyes she can still feel on her back.

She doesn't know, and were she told, at that moment she would not care. But later she will know – will know, and will regret. But by the time she finds out, she has also come to understand that regret is useless, that regret cannot protect her against men who call unkind words as she walks past them with her troupe of children too small to leave alone. And so she will stay quiet.

But she will still wish that in that moment, separated by chain-link and barbed wire, she had said something different with her eyes.


End file.
